Exhibition

Photojournalism 20/20: A Think Tank for an Unimaginable Present will be on view in CCP's Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery until December 4, 2021. Esta exposición está disponible en español.

This retrospective exhibition will survey the career of Marion Palfi (1907–1978), who produced one of the most important visual documents of American injustice of the twentieth century. Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940-1978 features over one hundred prints and numerous archival materials drawn exclusively from the Center for Creative Photography’s vast Marion Palfi Archive, including photobooks, magazine spreads, research journals, and grant applications. Many of these prints and expository archival materials have never before been exhibited or published and will offer an unprecedented opportunity to draw new insights into the work.

Palfi’s philosophy of using photography to influence social change shaped her vision and distinguished her career. A German immigrant to the United States during World War II, Palfi arrived in Los Angeles to find a reality far from the myth of the American Dream. Outraged at the economic, racial, and social inequalities she encountered, she spent over three decades traveling throughout the United States documenting troubled communities to expose the links between racism and poverty. As a self-described “social research photographer,” Palfi aspired for her photographs to live in the world and to effect social change. Her work was featured in numerous American periodicals, including Ebony and The New York Times. Sponsors for her work included the Council Against Intolerance in America, the NAACP, and the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing.

Each of the photographer’s four major projects are represented in the exhibition: her piercing nationwide study of children living in poverty; her decades-long civil rights activism documenting the effects of systemic racism against African Americans; her research on the abject conditions of aging in New York; and her revelatory pictures, funded by a 1967 Guggenheim fellowship, of the forced relocation of Native Americans off of reservations in the Southwest. Weaving together over three decades of work, the exhibition elucidates Palfi’s sustained focus on themes of inequity, solitude, racial victimization. Taken as a whole, it elucidates the photographer’s elegiac crusade for human rights and presents a cumulative photographic record that resonates with many of the social concerns still plaguing our country today.

Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography.  

As a featured component of the University of Arizona’s Family Weekend 2019, the Center for Creative Photography has designed its first-ever outdoor pop-up exhibition.  Including 63 images by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly (b. 1947), the exhibition shows the Pulitzer-prize winning photographer’s breadth of subjects.  Included are his early political pictures of Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford; entertainment images including Mick Jagger, Miles Davis, and Jerry Seinfeld; sports figures Mary Lou Retton, Mohammed Ali, and Carl Lewis; recent political figures President Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former President Jimmy Carter; and news events including a space shuttle lift off, presidential inaugurations, and a chilling view of the Penatgon on 9/11.

Kennerly has documented momentous events for newspaper and magazine publications, and as photographer to President Gerald Ford, for over fifty years. His photographs bring us closer to the world leaders who made the news, and to those impacted by their actions.

The pop-up exhibition will complement an exhibition of 25 of his fine art prints on display in the University of Arizona's Old Main, including a tender view of Arizonan Linda Ronstadt, profound pictures of Vietnam soldiers, an early color portrait of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennerly’s prize-winning frame of the Mohammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight.

The Center for Creative Photography is excited to be integrated into the activities of this popular fall event.  It is a powerful opportunity for Kennerly's work to be introduced to the campus community for students, parents, staff, faculty, and visitors to experience and enjoy.

Learn more about the David Hume Kennerly Archive.

Presented by Bank of America, Marshall Foundation, Arizona Arts, and Center for Creative Photography

David Hume Kennerly’s photographs of extraordinary and historic situations, offer us the same front-row perspective that he had when he made the images. Kennerly, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the age of 25, and became President Gerald Ford's official photographer two years later, has documented momentous events for newspaper and magazine publications for over fifty years. His photographs bring us closer to the world leaders who made the news, and to those impacted by their actions. His pictures depict war and dislocation, politics and government, celebrity and entertainment, as well as sports and everyday life.

Twenty-five of his most memorable images, selected to show the breadth and diversity of his vision, will be on display in the University of Arizona's Old Main. We see a tender view of Arizonan Linda Ronstadt and intense pictures of Vietnam soldiers. The august and commanding portrait of five presidents in the Oval Office contrasts with the arrested action of Kennerly’s prize-winning frame of the Mohammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. His images of the government include President Trump taking office and portraits of Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kennerly provides access to scenes most of us can only imagine. These photographs capture telling moments of the late twentieth and early twenty first century, and are critical visual documents for students, scholars, and historians.

As a component of the University of Arizona's Family Weekend celebration, an additional 63 images will be presented in an outdoor, pop-up exhibition along the UA Mall. The display will run Friday, October 11 through Sunday, October 13 only. Integrated into the activities of this popular fall event, Kennerly's work will be introduced to the campus community for students, parents, staff, faculty, and visitors to experience and enjoy.

Since the late 1960s, David Hume Kennerly has traveled the world to bear witness to pivotal events that shaped our lives. Through his work he reveals us to ourselves, sharing the world through his lens, and producing a lasting record.

Learn more about the David Hume Kennerly Archive.

Presented by Bank of America, Marshall Foundation, Arizona Arts, and Center for Creative Photography

Photographs as Letters explores the exchange of photographic materials sent through postal mail among twentieth-century American photographic communities. Drawn primarily from the Center for Creative Photography Archive the exhibition presents a range of photographic correspondence that lends insight into the working processes and networks of some of the United States’ most significant photographers. From finished fine prints to intentionally altered working materials, from postcards to print scraps and other darkroom castoffs, Photographs as Letters will afford visitors an opportunity to see the ways that members of American photographic communities have communicated and collaborated through postal mail.

Twentieth-century American photographer Ansel Adams famously said that the photographic negative is like a composer’s score, and the print a performance.  Drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive, at the Center for Creative Photography, housed in Tucson at the University of Arizona, this exhibition illustrates Adams’s meaning.  Throughout the exhibition of sixty photographs, sets of prints—grouped in twos and threes—show how on different occasions Adams created varying interpretations from his own negatives. These groups demonstrate how, using the same score, Adams was constantly revising the way it was performed.

Comparing and contrasting more than one print from the same negative demonstrates Adams’s choices about cropping, dodging and burning, and overall contrast and brightness. The wealth of material from the Adams Archive also reveals how, over time, his approach to certain negatives changed as his perspective evolved, the field transformed, and the available materials shifted. Above all, these comparisons show that Adams invested time and care in each hand-made print, producing interpretive artworks that come as much from his imagination as from the landscapes before which he stood. All of the exhibition’s prints, spanning the master’s six-decade career, highlight Adams’s particular talent and sensitivity as a photographic printer.

Many of the artworks are accompanied by quotations from Adams’s published writings, in which he discussed his process for an image. The photographer was known for his role as an educator and promoter of the photographic medium as an expressive artform, and he enthusiastically shared his techniques through workshops, journal articles, and publications. This presentation invites you to explore, through Adams’s body of work, the practice of black-and-white printmaking, and the range of expression a skilled photographer can create with this most fundamental of photographic processes. 

Ansel Adams’s long photographic career saw a significant shift in style between his early work, made between 1916 and 1941, and his most recognizable production, from 1941 through the end of his life in 1984. The catalyst for this change was a commission from the federal government: in 1941 Adams was hired by the Department of the Interior to make photographs of the national parks as part of a mural project to adorn the new Interior building in Washington D.C. He was honored to be hired for a project of such importance and personal significance. With the broad American public in mind as his audience, he set out on a trip through the Western United States to picture the country’s dramatic protected lands. 

Although the large-scale murals were not completed in Adams’s lifetime, the project had a huge impact on the photographer: the style he adopted for the national parks commission became his signature, characterizing much of his artwork for the rest of his life. He was so invested in taking pictures of America’s national parks that in the late 1940s he applied for, and received, a Guggenheim fellowship to continue documenting spectacular wilderness places after the funding for the initial commission ran out.

This exhibition presents twenty-two photographs, illustrating three elements in his body of work: his signature style, the shift in style in 1941, and his commercial work. His signature style will be shown through later works and national parks pictures made either for the mural project or on his Guggenheim fellowship which exhibit characteristic elements. Pairs and groupings of works that contrast early and later works will track the shift in his style. And finally examples of his commercial photography, a little known but important component of his career, illustrate the development of his artistic language.

In 1941, famed Modernist photographer Edward Weston embarked upon an epic cross-country road trip to create what would become his last major body of work: a suite of photographs made to accompany a luxury edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whereas Whitman considered his poems to be photographic, in that they presented a clear and truthful picture of his subjects, Weston wanted his photographs to be poetic – rather than simply illustrate Whitman’s text.

Weston’s photographs are presented in dialogue with recent acquisitions or lesser-known, never-before-exhibited works from the Center for Creative Photography’s permanent collection. The Heritage Gallery honors the Center’s founders while presenting a continuum of photographic practice across time.

Late in his life, in response to persistent public interest in how his images were made, Ansel Adams published Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. The book, which attempted to answer a question Adams’ was frequently asked, “How did you make this photograph?”, delves into the circumstances surrounding all aspects of the famed photographer’s image-making process. In it, Adams provides background to how he came to make certain images, outlines his thought process, and provides technical details related to each photograph. A mixture of Adams’ most iconic works, as well as lesser-known pictures, “Examples” delivers an insightful look into the photographer’s work and process.

Taking the book as its template Ansel Adams: Examples draws upon the Center for Creative Photography’s collection of Adams’ work to realize the premise of “Examples” with original prints and archival materials. Paired with text from the book, written by Adams himself, the exhibition affords viewers and unprecedented opportunity to familiarize themselves with the intricacies of Adams’ work.

The Center for Creative Photography and the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona are delighted to collaborate to exhibit a captivating project by B.A. Van Sise in a celebration of the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth. Van Sise is a New York–based photographer with a lifelong love of poetry and a family lineage that traces back to seminal American poet Walt Whitman. Van Sise has undertaken an expansive and inventive poetry portraiture project. Beginning in 2015, he embarked on a quest to make portraits of American poets that reflect the diversity and vitality of today’s poetry scene. Each portrait is a creative endeavor in which the poet becomes more an actor than a model, performing a concept Van Sise has created based upon one of the author’s poems. These narratives sometimes relate closely to the text (which is presented alongside the photograph), while at other times the connection is more abstract. The resulting “portraits” are at once a likeness of the poet, an evocation of the poem, and a presentation of a visual narrative fashioned by the photographer. 

The exhibition features one video portrait (of acclaimed poet Sharon Olds) and about 80 photographs showcasing the breadth of American poetry today, including a who’s who of Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, and Chancellors of the Academy of American Poetry. In the Center’s Heritage Gallery, adjacent to A Portrait of Poetry, related materials from the Center’s collection are shown to complement Van Sise’s ambitious project.